Build Your Own MAME Machine

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A primer for getting an arcade up and running in your living room.

By George Roush

Since the creation of MAME, fans of classic arcade games can revisit their favorites without going on a mad cross-country tour for surviving old-school arcades. Sure, you can just run emulators and ROMs on your PC, but there's no comparison to standing in front of a real-deal cabinet. Wouldn't you rather have your own arcade machine that can play over 3,500 of your favorite arcade hits? Think of the accolades you'll receive from friends as they wander through menu after menu of golden oldies like Scramble and Zaxxon. But how do you put together your own coin-op classic machine? Let us point you in the right directions.

There are two ways to own your own MAME arcade cabinet: Build one or buy one. For the lazy in all of us, the easiest way is to just go to eBay and buy a pre-assembled MAME machine for around $2,300. Ask your parents for money or come to grips with roughly 766 days of not eating lunch at school. Now, it's not cheap to make one either. But if you have an extra monitor or an older computer to spare, then you've eliminated the cost of two of your items. Plus, you can brag to your friends about awesome you are with tools.

So what are the main items you'll need? A cabinet, a monitor, a computer and a joystick are the big things on your list. Those are followed by money, time and Band-Aids when you realize you haven't pick up a saw since sixth-grade shop class.

Starting with a cabinet, you have a couple of options:

A blueprint from Stefan Gagne.

1. Build your own from scratch. This means going to Home Depot or Wild Willy's Wood N' Waffles and buying the plywood or fiberboard yourself and getting crazy with a jigsaw. There are plans and guides that can be found online. Some examples are here and here. This option is good if you have a garage or a dry, level backyard. You're looking at around $300 for the lumber, nuts and bolts.

2. Purchase a MAME arcade kit that has all of the pieces cut for you. Places like Arcadeshopper, Dreamarcades or MikesArcade have kits you can purchase online. This is a bit more expensive for you but if you're lazy or don't have the room or tools it's a good option to look at. Mike's Arcade has a fully assembled arcade cabinet for $375 that fits 19" monitors. This looks to be your best buy. Arcade Shopper has a 27" arcade cabinet for $600. Dream Arcade's kit comes with everything you need except the computer and will run you around $1,300.

Once your cabinet is finished you need to have a monitor for it. You can use a PC monitor or a television. Depending on how big you built your cabinet, 19" or 27" monitors are usually your main choices. PC monitors are easy to use because they'll hook right up to your computer. TV's require your video card support TV-Out which most of today's cards do anyway. You could go really old school and use an arcade monitor. Ultimarc has a video card to help you out with resolution problems should you go with the arcade monitor. (The downside to an arcade monitor is, if you are not careful with the back of it, it could shock you so hard you'll never have children.) This FAQ will make you the king of monitor trivia. Don't forget to buy some heavy duty monitor brackets as well.

Arcade monitor from Betson.

You can purchase a regular CRT computer monitor off of Craigslist for pretty cheap. Or go with an LCD monitor. Computer monitors are probably your best bet because they're simple to hook up to your PC, but aficionados say the best option to get the correct resolution and display is an arcade monitor. You're looking at anywhere from $20 for a used monitor anywhere up to $500 for a fancy one such as this from Betson.

Once you have your monitor installed in your cabinet, you need to get some sound out of your video games. If you used a TV, you can use the TV's speakers. Or buy some PC speakers if you're using a computer monitor and hook them up in your cabinet. It's up to you where to place them. Usually the top of the cabinet is fine. You don't need to go crazy and try to bump the music from Spy Hunter, no matter how cool that would sound. Some instructions on PC monitor installation can be found here.

Color choices.How about a joystick? You have some options here. Like the cabinet itself, you can build your own control panel or purchase a kit. Happcontrols sells a variety of joystick parts and buttons to get you going if you wish to build your own control panel.

Assembling the panel yourself is a great experiment in electronics, but with ready-made options so easy to find, you may find the trade-money ratio landing squarely in the favor of time. I used an X-Arcade two-player control panel, bought by an old roommate. This is a very solid panel -- good construction, button placement, and joystick responsiveness. Using it, I easily kicked his butt in Killer Instinct. Do not play against me in Killer Instinct. You will lose. The Tankstick (pictured below) goes for $200.

X-Arcade's sticks are perfect for your MAME machine.

Base kits for the X-Arcade are available as well and go for $75. Four player kits are $150. These kits can be found at Mameroom If you decide to use separate joysticks and buttons and put it together yourself, a good video guide for beginners can be found here. Epanorama has an excellent article on joysticks.

Video instructions for wiring an arcade controller.

Once you have everything assembled, you need the most important component: the computer. Keep in mind you need simply a PC to play Ms. Pac Man, not Crysis. You can get a pretty fast cheap PC for around $300-$400. Woot sometimes has good deals. Check Techbargains daily for PC deals on the Internet. Or you can simply build your own. I know you don't need a lot of RAM but it doesn't hurt to have a good amount, a nice sized hard drive, and a halfway decent processor. Any Pentium 4 will do and MAME will run on Windows or Mac. You can use a computer built 10 years ago to run MAME games but with today's prices, you can pick up a fast PC that's brand new for under $400. In case you're wondering, I have MAME running on both Windows XP and Windows Vista and I haven't had any issues with compatibility for either operating system.

Here's what I recommend:

P4 or higher processor

1GB of ram

250GB hard drive. (You don't need that much space, but hard drives are so cheap nowadays.)

Any one of today's entry-level to mid-range video cards will work fine. Make sure it has TV-Out if you decide to use a television for your monitor.

Check out Best Buy, Circuit City or even look at these refurbished machines from Newegg. The computer is your most important component but it should also be the least of your worries.

Emulators and ROMs to play these old school games can be found online. MAME's official website is a good starting point. There are a lot of FAQs out there and plenty of forum boards to help you out. It's not that hard to set up and get going. When you download a ROM, simply stick it in your ROMS folder. No need to unzip it. This excellent tutorial on MAME options will help you out with configuring MAME to run the way you want it to.

Finishing touches such as a marquee from MameMarquees will make your arcade machine look straight out of 1983 -- and that's a compliment. Art costs around $20 for the top to $135 for sides. You can even add coin doors for the sake of realism or nostalgia (or greed) and can usually pick those up on eBay for around $30.

And there you have it. With a little work and time you too can have your own arcade machine in your house that can cost you anywhere from a few hundred dollars to three grand depending on your budget.